James Kramer feels your pain. But he's touchy-feely only in the most literal
sense: His company, Virtual Technologies Inc., specializes in products
like CyberGrasp,
a glove that lets each of your digits perceive the shape and firmness of
graphical objects. Unlike VR visionaries who wrestle with the ethical impact
of avatars, Kramer wants to put this power at your fingertips today - his
most pressing concern is extending the reach of haptics, aka force feedback,
beyond 14-year-old kids glued to a SideWinder joystick. And thanks to VTi
(www.virtex.com/), the future points
to increasingly intimate immersive environments, from virtual operating
rooms to hands-on chat rooms. Wired asked Kramer how far we are from a
telecosm where you can truly reach out and touch someone.

Wired: What's today's market for force feedback?

Kramer: Force feedback is being used in simulation, training, and, of course,
entertainment. The market's already bigger than people think, and it's
going to be huge. Right now, Microsoft is probably raking in 50 percent
of all haptics being sold with SideWinder. Everyone will be surprised in
a few years when we buy Microsoft. [Laughs.] But VTi's focus is beyond
just toys: We plan to make the hand ubiquitous in human-computer interaction.

Isn't it already? Just about everyone has a keyboard and a mouse.

For applications like spreadsheets, the 2-D desktop metaphor is fine -
it's overkill to add a third dimension to a piece of paper. We're expanding
the standard tool set so that as more applications extend to three dimensions,
you can wear a CyberGlove while typing text or clicking a mouse, but you
can also reach into your computer and manipulate a 3-D object directly.
Whole-hand interaction will eventually be a required part of every system.

Beyond literal drag-and-drop applications, what will this mean?

Simulating a medical procedure, for example, whether it be laparoscopic
surgery or cutting open a cornea with a scalpel instrumented to feel like
it's cutting. Sitting inside a virtual Corvette, you'll be able to move
a shift lever, turn a stereo knob, and interact with the digital mockup
before ever fabricating a part.

Sounds great - and a bit familiar. Isn't this the same type of thing VR
has been promising for years?

Sure, but now some of these VR applications are becoming reality, and more
are on the way. There are a lot of serious players - military, government,
big industry - doing impressive development in this area. And every other
day someone's introducing a lower-cost, more-polygons-per-second graphics
card for the PC. That sort of technology goes hand-in-hand with the exotic
VR peripheral devices such as instrumented gloves and head-mounted displays
that are making the paradigm viable.

So this is something we can get our hands on, not just hype?

We've had it
in our hands since the University of North Carolina's pioneering
work in molecular docking, one of the earliest practical applications,
where you could actually feel molecules fit together.

What about today's tools - can they tell the difference between smooth
or slimy, the feel of a cat's fur versus a baby's skin?

Not yet. Your fingertip has one of the highest densities of nerve endings
anywhere on your body - incredible point-to-point discrimination, very
fine spatial detail. But devices such as CyberGrasp do simulate object
properties such as size, shape, and stiffness, or the sensation of dragging
your finger across a rough surface. Slime might be a hard one to simulate.

How do you bridge the gap?

Some have tried to use other cues to fool or bypass the haptic channel
- for instance, a sound or color change that tells you your hand is touching
something. But if you're trying to train someone to perform a task, they're
learning to react based on the wrong types of cues. They're not learning
transferable skills.

Sounds like VTi's focus is less the possible than the practical.

Any company that plans to stay around for a while has to be market-driven.
If the folks at Ford say they need to discriminate between leather and
fabric seat cushions, then maybe we'll jump to work on that. Regardless,
we're cutting off pieces we know we can chew so we can actually get something
out and working in our lifetime. We're interested in practical ways to
get the body into the computer and the computer back to the body. In fact,
we've even worked on a full-body extension of our CyberGlove - the CyberSuit
may be coming soon to a VR theater near you.

Will entertainment bring the first mass-market applications?

One of the biggest will be Internet entertainment, e.g., adding the feedback
element to 3-D chat rooms. You'll feel it as you open virtual doors, pass
objects between rooms, or share them in a single room - it adds a new level
of realism to the encounter.

Such as cybersex?

My standard answer, to a question we get frequently: "Virtual
Technologies
is creating an enabling technology - where our users take it is up to the
application engineers."

OK, we'll stay out of the bedroom - what about the home office?

The home office will become the ultimate
telecommunications/entertainment
system - with just the press of a button, physical or virtual,
you'll change from simulated office to simulated vacation
to simulated training to simulated learning. You'll be able to take a
10-minute trip without leaving your living room. Or go back in history.

How immersive will it be? Like Brave New World's "feelies"?

I was envisioning a desktop environment, maybe something called Microsoft
Office Getaway: Click on your deep-sea exploration, or time-travel expedition.
Using a Sound Blaster, head-mounted display, and CyberGlove, you'd be able
to run your hand across the deck of the Titanic, or pick up a Martian rock,
or play beach volleyball. The company that creates a new 3-D operating
system embracing this capability will dominate the computers of the future.
There won't be a Windows 2001 - it will be called Rooms.

What about a virtual full-contact sport?

A flexible haptic body liner wouldn't knock you off your feet without a
sophisticated ground-referenced force. Science fiction writers fantasize
about a more efficient way: jacking into the brain stem to program the
sensations directly. I'd be a bit concerned if your computer crashed during
a download.

Either way, it sounds like a step toward the convergence of man and machine.
Will force feedback force the next evolutionary leap?

On the contrary, people will de-evolve. We'll revert to the intuitive
way
of picking up an object we all learn as children - reach out and grab it
with your hand. And your hand will open the door to whatever your imagination
can hold.

Jordan S. Gruber is an intellectual property attorney currently working
at NASA, former managing editor of Gnosis Magazine, and proprietor of
www.enlightenment.com/.